You know, the weather version of AI.

“I didn’t know these cars were good in the snow,” Boone murmured as the trainee eyed that mini-Killington like he wasn’t sure whether he was going to get his car door open.

“Just dematerialize out on my side.”

“Good deal. Thank you.”

Butch got out and held things open. “And as for the R8, Audi quattro works year-round. All you need are good treads. No clearance on that front air dam, though. Two inches, tops, is all we’ve got to work with.”

Of all the trainees, Butch had always liked Boone the best. Maybe it was because the kid was the kind of stand-up, no-fuss, steady-Freddy type that tended to form the backbone of any good team. After all, Butch had always wanted to be that guy himself—and failed spectacularly when he was a human. But finally, after a good three decades of trying to drink away his emotions, he was getting to that goal. All it had taken was the female of his dreams, a jump-started transition into a whole different species, and free rein to express himself sartorially.

But there was another reason he cared about the kid after last night. He couldn’t help but take an interest because he knew all too well what it was like to lose a family member in a bad way.

Boone re-formed on the outside of the R8 and looked around at the abandoned buildings with their broken windows. “Is it safe to leave V’s car here? What if it gets stolen.”

“Full coverage on the insurance.” Butch shut the door. “But more to the point—everyone’s going to assume it’s a drug dealer’s whip. Guaranteed it’ll be right here when we get back.”

Butch hit the lock, and the pair of them fell in side by side at a walk. “You can’t trust anyone on the street, but you can always put your faith in how the street behaves.”

With the cracked sidewalks so not an option because of the piles of snow, they proceeded down the middle of the plowed street. Even though the only going concerns in this part of the city were the drug dealers on the corners and the prostitutes on the straightaways, there was enough through traffic so that the snowpack evened out the potholed asphalt underneath.

“Can I ask you something?” Boone said into the cold.

“Anything.”

“That voice recording. The one that was from the call-in line—was V able to trace the phone number it came in on? I mean, he’s the one who’s so good at that stuff, right?”

“He thinks it was a burner. And if that’s true, we’re not going to find anything out about who owns it or used it unless they answer the damn thing and are willing to talk.”

“And she didn’t leave a name.” Boone laughed in a hard burst. “Okay, that’s a stupid thing to say, I guess. Because I didn’t hear a name on the message.”

“Tell me what you did hear.”

“She was scared. She was really scared.”

“What else?” As Boone recited the message word for word, Butch nodded. “Yup, you got all that right. But what about the background?”

“Like when the call came in?”

“No, of the call itself.” Butch glanced over. “What did you hear.”

The trainee frowned. “Nothing—” Those dark brows lifted. “Ohhhh. So she didn’t call from the club. If she had, we would have heard the music and the crowd around her.”

“Exactly. And V told me that he had no service on the lower level of that old factory—so it’s a good guess that whoever called in also didn’t have a signal down there.”

“She must have phoned from outside the building, then.”

“Or maybe she wasn’t there at all.”

“What do you mean?”

Butch looked both ways as they crossed the street even though there were no cars around. “Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing when you investigate a case, especially in the beginning. The truth needs space and airtime to reveal itself. The only way to make sure that happens is to let your brain and your senses record every nuance while at the same time you resist your rational side’s desire to come to any hard-and-fast conclusions. There is a solution to the whodunit out there. I promise you that. But you have to earn the right to that revelation, and the way we do that is by sacrificing our assumptions at the altar of OMG-I-know-what-happened.”

“But you have to decide some things, though, right? Like who to talk to? And what to ask them?”

“The truth will tell you who you need to interview and what you need to ask and where you have to go. You don’t decide a thing.” Butch shook his head. “I’ll say it again. You’ve got to watch for confirmation bias. It sneaks in and causes you to deliberately or subconsciously deny the existence of facts which do not support a given conclusion that you’ve pulled out of your ass. Truth is absolute, but it’s like the existence of God. You don’t know you’ve got it until you do.”

“Have you ever failed to solve a case?”

“I had a ninety-two percent success rate. Which, considering how much I was drinking while I was a detective for the CPD, is a miracle.”

“Wow. You must be really good at what you’re doing.”

Butch thought of the last image he’d had of his fifteen-year-old sister, Janie, waving at him as she had been driven off to her death in that car full of teenage boys.

He shook his head. “Nah, I just refused to quit. Even if it killed me, and it nearly did, I wasn’t going to stop what I was doing until I nailed every one of my victims’ killers.” He looked back over at his trainee. “That’s something else you should keep in mind. Your chances of finding the bad guy increase to an astronomical level if you outwork their need to stay ahead of you. Sooner or later, all killers, even the good ones, slip up. You just gotta be ready to take advantage of that version of Murphy’s Law.”

“I’ll keep all this in mind. I promise.”

Annnnnnd see, this was why he liked working with the kid, Butch thought. Boone listened, accepted advice and criticism, and always tried to do his best.

Butch reached over and gave the trainee’s shoulder a squeeze. “I know you will, son.”

As Boone strode along next to the Brother, it was a relief to focus his mind on something other than himself. Too bad the topic was violence and death, but that was his job, wasn’t it. And he was on the right side of that ledger. One of the good guys.

That mattered.

“So what else about the call?” Butch asked him.

Up ahead, now only three blocks away, it was easy to make out the club’s wait line of humans, the lot of them stomping their feet in the cold, their extravagant wigs and wild makeup the only things that showed of their costumes because everything else was covered up by Joe Blow parkas and full-length coats. In the warmer months, he imagined, they would be like a stand of peacocks, flashing their particular extravagancies in a mating ritual designed to be successful according to the LARPers’ value system.

Is the killer standing there even now? Boone thought as he remembered the choking horror and fear in that female’s voice recording.

“What else did you learn on that call?” the Brother prompted.

Boone’s eyes went down the lineup of humans, memorizing each face. The body types. The hairstyles.

Rage coiled in his gut. And to answer Butch’s question? Well, the other thing he’d picked up on from that call was that whoever had put the terror in that female’s voice, whoever had killed the most recent victim, needed to die in the same terrible way.

Somehow, that didn’t seem like a good thing to throw out there—

He snapped his head toward the Brother. “‘The other one.’ In the call, she said ‘just like the other one.’”

“Righto. So what does that tell us?”

Boone narrowed his eyes on that wait line again, his fangs descending. “There will be others unless we stop the killer.”

“Yup. That is the one conclusion that I am allowing myself to draw at this point.”

On that note, Butch unbuttoned his fine cashmere coat. Which was protocol for when anyone interacted with humans. You know, just in case you needed to get to your weapon. As Boone did the same to his leather jacket, he felt that anger of his shift inside of his skin. He was so hoping that they found the guy who did this tonight—

Butch stopped dead in the street. “Not ‘guy.’”

Pulling up short, Boone looked around. “What?”

“You just said you hope we find the ‘guy’ who did it tonight.” Butch shook his head. “We don’t know whether the killer is a male or female. Remember, no assumptions at this point, okay? And when we’re in there, just observe. I’m going to do most of the work.”

Jesus, Boone thought. He wasn’t even aware of having spoken out loud.

“Yes, sir.”

Butch clapped Boone on the shoulder and resumed walking. “You’re going to do fine.”

As they closed in on the entrance to the old shirt factory, bypassing the line, the two bouncers at the door flexed up, but they ultimately didn’t follow through on the my-turf posturing. Instead, the two men just nodded the way in clarity, like they’d been hit in the face with a pair of VIP passes.

You had to love mind control over humans. And it was not a surprise that Butch clearly was a master at the manipulation.

“So you’ve been here before?” the Brother asked as they entered and went past a coat check.

Boone made a mental note to talk to the woman on duty, except how would that go:

Hey, have you seen any vampires go past you?

Oh, yeah, sure. About three hundred every night. Were you looking for one?

He shook himself back into focus. “Ah, I’ve only been here once, and it was a while ago. But like I said, my cousins come a couple times a year.”

“Yeah, this doesn’t seem like your scene.”

Boone checked out a half-naked human who was vomiting into a plastic bag in the dark corner. “No. It’s not.”